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Understanding the Everyday Designer in Organisations

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Tackling Society's Grand Challenges with Design Science (DESRIST 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9661))

Abstract

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment of technology in organisations. The paper describes the experiences of 18 everyday designers in an academic setting using three concepts: everyday designer in an organisation, empathy through design and experiencing an awareness gap. These concepts were constructed through the analysis of in-depth interviews with the participants. The paper concludes with a call for tool support for everyday designers in organisations to enable them to better understand the audience for whom they are designing and the role technology plays in the organisation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

    Ciarán O’Leary, Fred Mtenzi & Claire McAvinia

Authors
  1. Ciarán O’Leary
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  2. Fred Mtenzi
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  3. Claire McAvinia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ciarán O’Leary .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, Canada

    Jeffrey Parsons

  2. University of Jyväskylöä, Jyväskylä yliopisto, Finland

    Tuure Tuunanen

  3. Curtain University, Bentley, Australia

    John Venable

  4. Innovation Value Institute, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co., Kildare, Ireland

    Brian Donnellan

  5. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Markus Helfert

  6. Intel Labs Europe, Leixlip, Ireland

    Jim Kenneally

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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O’Leary, C., Mtenzi, F., McAvinia, C. (2016). Understanding the Everyday Designer in Organisations. In: Parsons, J., Tuunanen, T., Venable, J., Donnellan, B., Helfert, M., Kenneally, J. (eds) Tackling Society's Grand Challenges with Design Science. DESRIST 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9661. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39294-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39294-3_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39293-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39294-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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